'They looked like such good girls': the mystery of Genet's murderous Maids

Unwomanly monsters, revolutionaries or worms who turned? As Jean Genet’s classic play is revived in London, the macabre story of the Papin sisters, who killed their employer’s wife and daughter, still has the power to perplex

Social codes broken … Uzo Aduba, Laura Carmichael and Zawe Ashton in the new revival of Genet’s The Maids

There is a famous photograph of Christine and Léa Papin, taken before they committed the double murder on 2 February 1933 that made these unassuming housemaids two of the most infamous women of the 20th century. In the photograph, the sisters, heads touching and wearing identical hairstyles and dresses with starched white collars, stare out towards the camera. It’s as if they are presenting a united front in the face of something they find mildly perplexing and which only they can see.

A united front? Portrait of Christine and Léa Papin

After their arrest for the murders of their employer’s wife, Madame Lancelin, and her daughter Genevieve, the photograph was widely circulated, with many commenting that they looked like such good girls. Even Simone de Beauvoir puzzled over what could have transformed these women into such vengeful “haggard furies”. Evidence that the sisters were lovers further fuelled the idea of monstrous and unnatural women who had broken all social codes of femininity not just by killing, but killing other women.

The murderous act of the Papin sisters has become an enduring dramatic spectacle and one which, as Rachel Edwards and Keith Reader observe in their study The Papin Sisters, has “through the profuseness of its textual reproductions … acquired a grisly kind of immortality.” The story has been retold, reinterpreted and re-presented in numerous ways, from Wendy Kesselman’s My Sister in This House to Ruth Rendell’s A Judgment in Stone, and Paula Rego’s 1987 painting to Jean Genet’s extraordinary 1947 play, The Maids. Genet’s play is now being revived in London by Jamie Lloyd, starring Uzo Aduba (who plays Suzanne “Crazy Eyes” Warren in TV’s Orange Is the New Black) and Zawe Ashton (from Fresh Meat) as the maids and Downton Abbey’s Laura Carmichael as the mistress they plot to murder.

Nicole Ward Jouve has pointed out that in the case of the Papin sisters, “every representation or explanation that is offered” becomes part of the act itself. The murder is repeatedly played out through its cultural manifestations. But exactly what happened at 6 Rue Bruyère in Le Mans on that night in 1933 will always remain concealed. After her arrest, 21-year-old Léa, the younger by six years, told the police: “From now on, I am deaf and dumb.”

What we do know is that the drama began when Madame Lancelin and Genevieve failed to join Monsieur Lancelin for a prearranged supper. He returned to the house on the Rue Bruyère to find the front door bolted against him and the home in darkness, although a dim light could be seen at the attic window where the maids slept. When he and the police eventually gained access, a bloody scene met their eyes. Madame Lancelin and her daughter lay dead on the landing. Their eyeballs had been torn from their sockets.

There were fears that the maids had suffered a similar fate and the women’s bolted attic door heightened concern. But when the door was forced open, Christine and Léa were discovered alive and well, lying quietly together in bed. On the floor was a bloody hammer. The sisters immediately admitted their responsibility.

Jean Genet (middle) sitting next to William S Burroughs on a visit the US in the 1960s. Photograph: Hulton Getty

It emerged that shortly before mother and daughter arrived home, a fuse had blown in the house caused by an iron which had only just been repaired after a similar incident. The costs for the previous incident had been deducted from Christine and Léa’s wages. Could such an event really have driven the sisters to murder? Christine declared: “I’d rather have had our bosses’ hides than for them to have had ours.” This led to their case being taken up by those who saw what they had done as a revolutionary act, two oppressed women striking a blow against their bourgeois employers. The psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan enhanced his reputation by writing about the case, arguing that the women killed their mistresses because they saw in them their own mirror image.

It’s an idea taken up in Genet’s play, in which fantasy and reality fold into each other. The story is reimagined in a ritualised, hyper-theatrical dance of death, or what Jean-Paul Sartre described as “a black mass”, in which the two maids renamed Claire and Solange – play a deadly game where personalities and identities are fluid and exchangeable, as the pair plot to dispatch their spoilt mistress with poisoned tea.

Benedict Andrews, who with Andrew Upton co-authored the salty new version being used in London, and which was first produced in Australia in 2013 with Cate Blanchett and Isabelle Huppert as the maids, has described Genet’s play as “a failed revenge drama”. It is, but it is something more. As Ward Jouve says of Genet and his play: “It is precisely because there is so much theatre about his theatre that he puts his finger on truths that others were blind to.”

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Maids usually only ever get a walk-on role in drama, but Genet – who, like the Papin sisters themselves, was an outcast, considered a socially unacceptable deviant – lets Claire and Solange take centre stage like grand divas giving one last big performance before they face the final curtain. For the real Christine and Léa, there was no grand gesture or final act. Less than five years after the murders Christine, whose death sentence had been commuted to life imprisonment, died in an asylum in Rennes. Léa served eight years of her sentence for hard labour before being released in the 1940s and quietly slipping away into obscurity.

But every night in Genet’s play, they come to life again and transcend the ugly reality of their lives. For a brief hour or so they dazzle us all over again.